Riding the wind at 14

PETER GUINTA

Sunday

Nov 27, 2011 at 12:35 AM

Murray Middle School student Ben Henderson of St. Augustine received a glider pilot's license last week on his 14th birthday and can explain in detail how to keep an aircraft flying for hours without an engine.

On his birthday, the gifted eighth-grader flew a 53-foot-wingspan Super Blanik glider, rode warm columns of air, circled the airfield and landed without a thump. He did this over and over.

Henderson said the thermals that day weren't the best.

Still they were good enough so he could earn his glider license from his instructor, Phyllis Thorpe.

Thorpe said, "Young students really pick up everything quickly, Ben is my first student who soloed on his 14th birthday, so it's special for me."

Ben's lessons began in July.

"I was using a Microsoft Flight Simulator and clicked on the gliding program," he said. "I liked it and my dad said, 'Why don't you come out?'"

"Out" was to Herlong Field on Normandy Boulevard in Jacksonville, which also serves as a private airfield and Civil Air Patrol base.

A glider is a fragile, expensive aluminum machine until it becomes airborne and then the only thing a pilot hears is the rushing of the wind over the glider's exterior.

Each must be tethered to an airplane to launch. When the plane leaves the ground, there is a short period of "what's going on?" and then it smooths out and flies to higher and higher altitudes.

When ready, the pilot pulls a lever that severs the connection to the aircraft and suddenly all sound seems to stop and the entire landscape is laid out as the glider slowly moves through the air.

The pilot is then alone, "feeling" for invisible warm air bubbles that keep the aircraft aloft.

On Ben's big day, the airplane pilot was Mark Dickman, music director for the University of North Florida, who was flying a Piper Pawnee single-engine.

Wayne Henderson, Ben's father and a licensed glider pilot himself, was once a Navy pilot flying off the decks of aircraft carriers.

"I got out of flying when I became a lawyer," Wayne Henderson said. "Ben liked the idea of flying gliders and we joined a glider club. It was a beautiful way to begin to fly."

Glider pilots can legally earn their licenses at 14 years old. Airplane pilots must be at least 16.

Thorpe said her husband was also a glider instructor and they knew a man named Shawn Knickerbocker who flew all the way to Tallahassee and back in a glider.

On the field during Ben's qualifying flight was glider expert and retired physician Bill Clarke, 81, of Jacksonville, who said the gliders used in World War II had a big influence on private gliding in the United States.

He once watched "sail planes" doing aerobatics at a Sanford air field in 1946, and said a Disney film about a man flying a glider among condors in California "turned a lot of people on to gliders."

Clarke now has 4,600 hours in gliders, once flying from Chile through the Andes, from Germany to Spain and from Philadelphia to Knoxville, Tenn., a distance of 1,700 miles.

"There are people with more (flying hours than me)," he said, pointing to a sign at Herlong that said "North Florida Soaring Society," a local glider club.

Wayne Henderson praised the all volunteer Civil Air Patrol for its "commitment to core values" and its "development of future leaders" and congratulated his son on earning the license.

Ben is a member of the St. Augustine Composite Squadron, tasked with providing emergency services and aerospace education to the community and providing cadet programs for young people ages 12 to 21.

When Ben's qualifying flight was completed, his family, instructors and people just watching the flying congratulated him as he tried to dodge the ceremonial "ripping of the shirt."

No one knew when or why that tradition began.

Ben's advice to fellow students interested in gliding, "Come and do it!"

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